a small tragicomedy

Perhaps the tenderest song in the living idiom (Bon Iver's "Re: Stacks") was playing from my laptop over on the shelf by my armchair, as the rain and distant thunder we earned with the day's thick heat splatted steadily on the landscaping rocks outside my closed basement window, muffled and tinned by the plastic-framed glass. I was sitting in bed writing the journal version of this blog post, which was longer and had other things in it, bringing one more rambling summer day to its close with the quiet of the bed beneath me and the page in front of me and the rain outside and the song that pierced them all and sewed them to my heart to patch its tatters, today's allowance of the hope of heaven.

The heater by my bed came on and vacuumed over the whole intimate soundscape.

I watched the needle quiver a little on the meter in my soul that determines if, in my current estimation, the cosmos is fundamentally a good place to be or a bad one, and, grieving the banal tragedy, got up and turned it off.

I slipped back under the covers and against my pillows and wondered if such moments could be re-entered, or if prosaic intrusions upon delicate perfection were fatal to the spirit, forcing one, as they do, to laugh at oneself, to relativize the ferocious wrath that rises at the trespasser (because it is absurd to rage against a space heater), and thereby to relativize the entire experience that the wrath rises up to defend. The small black box of malice* was sitting innocently in the corner, a (now-)quiet emissary of the noisy, plastic world that brands its block letters on pastoral landscapes and that wedges its winking and nudging dramas into all the interstices of daily life, a world from which for a few moments alone in bed I had thought, perhaps, my heart and I were safe. The needle dipped deeper into the cynical half of the meter.

But then, from another blinking appliance in the room,

Your love will
be safe with me

Justin Vernon sang, and just as quickly as the moment had been broken before, I found it in my heart to overlook the inanimate offense and softly to pick up the song again, because with seven words another human heart reminded mine that I'm the only one in the room who knows what this means, to sing to one another, and that for all its blundering indecency, a space heater's nothing to blush before.

Here's to the humans driving the machines. May we ever sing to one another's hearts, even unto the technopocolypse.

*To be fair (not to the de-anthropomorphized space heater, but to its human designers), it is actually quite an attractive appliance, not aptly described as a black box. However, neither is its artfully crafted shape aptly described in any other way, and so I let my impassioned words stand.

morning, January 7: a frozen prospect

It is very cold today, so cold most of the schools in the state are closed. The tea in the mug in my hand was steaming wildly as soon as I was halfway out the door, its warmth being called out to fill (a Sisyphean task) the vast void of the cold. I choked on my first breath, the air was so dry, and I quickly stuck my nose into the warm exhalations of my honey green tea. Sharp air and sharp light. I heard the jingle of a dog's collar; I couldn't see with the light in my eyes; I turned the other way, to walk round the shadowed side of the house, away from the neighbors.

To the River.

En route, the glister of white ice crystal snow not deep enough to quite bury green and flax grass blades--washed-up fossils of summer--caught my eye so that I stopped and stooped. The light so pure, the air so clear, sight in the cold is dazzling. All matter's sharpened edges glint.

The River on our side is almost totally frozen over and is smoothly strewn with white snow like the sand or sawdust of a rustic floor. For weeks a narrow channel of open water, about six feet across, had remained, strikingly straight, in which Baltic blue water, chilled and cleared from its sultry summer brown, forged along in its course to Hannibal and New Orleans, rippling against the sheaths of ice that were its banks like a worker humming at his work. The River is so quiet here, human development so spare and inconspicuous, that I almost always catch glimpses of the ghosts of Native oarsmen gliding under the eagles down the pulsing central artery of this wild, young land, and in the cold, I pictured Eskimo-like fishermen at home in the austere white expanse traversing this channel.

But today all that was left of the channel was a long narrow gash, the water exposed by it coursing beneath the ice like lifeblood. The fingers clutching my warm mug were starting to sting as I made my way to the Front Stoop, as I call the metal stairs that finish the descent from the top of our bank to the water begun by a narrow grassy descent, bower-like. You duck down this sort of tunnel formed by valley-shaped ground and arched-shaped branches and the River reappears. You stand or sit down by it, engulfed by a world that stretches from river bottom to sky top with wooded land in between, the plane on which you stand. Birds stitch the realms together, rising from branches to skid their wings against the sky, swooping to break the water's gliding surface, settling back into the trees.

The unleafed branches on our bank were being knocked about by little furry woodpeckers whose work sounded just like the knocks of the construction workers' nail guns that used ricochet from rooftops, bouncing between the walls of houses and off of the asphalt street, when we lived in the city. Vaster knocking sounds came from the stripped trunks and branches on the island creaking in the quiet like ship's rigging. Then I heard not just a knocking but a rustle and turned to see a little woodpecker quite close to me jabbing its beaked head at twiggy branches so small they seemed unlikely to me to hold any insects. (Is that still what they're looking for, in winter?) I had wondered earlier this morning how the birds would fare today, when the skinned humans all planned to stay indoors. Were their wispy feathers enough to keep their pattering hearts from freezing? If this guy was any indication, they were going to be fine. He was as fuzzy as a baby bobcat, a shaggy version of his well-groomed summer self, downy white feathers spotted with black wisping from beneath his black and white pinion overcoat. A spot of red sat on the back of his head, like a hard hat, I thought.

Because we live across from an island, the portion of river we are used to seeing is really only half of it. The island's upper end isn't too far past the end of our property, so upstream we can see the whole width of the river. The far bank at this point is the Clear Lake SNA (Scientific & Natural Area), so it is wild, and I love gazing at the stand of white-barked trees that slope down from a high ridge to the north. They often catch the sun when the rest of the river is already in evening shadow, and they glow golden with the light of the sun invisible to the rest of us. I was looking at these, and then noticed a sort of mist at the level of the water--steam rising from open water, I ascertained soon after from a higher vantage point. (From the same prospect I noticed tracks I couldn't see before. They were small and round. Cat, I thought. From the window yesterday afternoon I'd seen one of the neighborhood feral cats picking its way along the ridge in the neighbor's yard and then disappearing over its edge. The tracks, sure enough, descended from that part of the bank before they led right up to the edge of the bit of open water, and doubled back. Was it seeking fish, or only a glimpse of its own reflection?) It is only our side of the island that is frozen and snowed over, it looks like. There is a broad space of open water toward the far bank, and it was steaming in the sun on this cold day.

Like my tea, which by the time I returned indoors was positively chilled along with my numb red ears and hardened cheeks. But the cold, dry air wettened my eyes and sharpened my sight, and it made my blood sing loud in warm veins, as my pulsing arteries keep my young heart beating under winter down in this frozen northern homeland.

dubious jungle fruit, for your snacking pleasure

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years,
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres,
Trying to learn to use words. And each attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure,
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. So each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to regain what has been lost
And found, and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

from T.S. Eliot's "East Coker"

I've heard it said, or I've said it myself, that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Maybe so. But it's at least equally important, in practical life, to recognize that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly. That is, imperfectly. That is, in the only way in which it can be done by me.

I'd like to re-enter this particular mode of expression (blog). It's an oddly public yet oddly limited one in terms of audience, but even that brings certain benefits. As I continue to differentiate into the human subspecies Undergraduate philosophy* student, several peculiarly bloggish qualities are increasingly important to me.

For one, this sort of writing forces concrete, temporally situated articulations of a cross-section of my impressions and thoughts, with the additional requirement of some measure of narrative continuity across time. Arresting the amorphous mental ooze and flutter, the flower and screech of the jungle-- Wait, to be fair to my educational institution and reassuring to my parents, I must acknowledge that much of my thought life is, of course, forcibly cultivated in rows by the discipline of being a student, taking classes with articulate syllabuses and set reading lists and, cough, writing assignments (ah, this blood-sucking blog, requiring always on the altar some innocent victim: a good night's sleep, or an unrushed Pride & Prejudice paper... or both...) Yet still, I say, wading through the rest, the borderland wilds, the jungle, and prying from the dirt a few exotic vegetative specimens, unraveling their twining shoots from the tangle, bringing them back to be potted in the greenhouse, is worthwhile for me as writer (even if not for you as reader). I've compared this blog to a greenhouse before, I think, and I do like the image. The collection of thoughts here is artificed, a sort of representative display of something wider and wilder, but the thoughts are still living. Composing a blog post forces my constant half-conscious musing to a serious test of articulation and intelligibility, indeed, gives them the opportunity to realize what the choking, crowded darkness and disorganization of the wild would never have allowed to come to fruition. I do not wish to live lost in a jungle, alone and uncivilized, among half-formed, feral thoughts. I want to bring back my curious happenings-upon, at least some of them, to our man-made shared places. I want to write in words people will understand and enjoy. Writing a blog post requires (a bit) more communicative polish than journaling, but not as much disciplinary specificity, in content or in form and vocabulary, as a school paper. Rambling here is a mode of expression I wish to stay practiced in, and you (whoever you are) are an audience to whom I desire to be able to continue to tell my story, even as new words enter my vocabulary and new names and new projects take on particular importance in my vision of the world and of my place in it.

For all my talk of discipline, it's clear that editing for concision and clarity aren't huge priorities. The truth is, for me this blog is just a rollicking wordy good time, and that's really why I'm doing it. It's an existential plus if it happens to be fun for anyone to read it, but, well, for me there is only the trying. The rest is not my business.

*One-step choose-your-own-footnote-adventure!

Option One (in calculus terms): This is my instantaneous velocity. Time shall tell what sort of curve this is.

Option Two (in historical [?] terms): This is an accurate statement of my current intent and orientation. Of what temporal extent is its accuracy remains to be seen.

"I am learning to see"

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the narrator, Malte, newly arrived in Paris from rural Denmark (I think) and starting a new life there, repeats in his journal these words: "I am learning to see." Malte's pronouncement fits in my mouth, here in this place I persist in calling new, even though the Minneapolis-to-outback translocation happened more than a year ago for our family. I'm learning to see. At least, I'm feeling the need to learn to see. Because here and in Hillsdale my life felt... Well, "threadbare" was the adjective that recurred. If my mind is a wood-walled room and I'm inside, from the raw wool of experience my ratio weaves tapestries to clothe the walls--internalized, simplified images of the wide world outside, small enough for me to contemplate and live within. My old tapestries are now piled in the corner and these new ones, images I'm frantically weaving of these new places, are thin and gauzy. Quickly my consciousness wears through them, hits the flat, bare wall behind, and I blunder into uncomprehending flatness.

But another sensation counterbalances the threadbareness. There are chinks in my wooden walls, and through them come whiffs of something high and heady, something with an unadulterated, dizzying richness to it; something Not Man-Made. I catch it in the profligate green and drenching golden sun outside my window when I first open my eyes in the morning, or else the unutterable sweetness of the sounds of leaf-swishing rain; in the ruckus of birdspeak (it does not much sound like song to me) and the mutterings of petulant squirrels, loudly heedless of humanity, that distract my attempts to read out of doors; in the wide-open, green-blushed spaces I bike through on dusty roads that roll on under untiring blue, etchings of gravel and dirt upon a broad, green woodblock; in a lonely, weathered-wood sign swinging by a mailbox at the mouth of a long, green-screened drive, the only sign to me from the place's unaccountable, inscrutable inhabitants; and perhaps most of all in the flagrance, the total intemperance of the star-spangled night. Driving home from the Cities one night, incautiously I crane my head out of the car window and upward; around like the jetting pillars of a gothic cathedral the walls of the sky throw themselves upward, on and up and on, impossibly wide, undivably deep, all singing with the white-hot, clear-cold, pinprick, snowflake dust of a million stars, and the whole thing still luminous with the newness of the night, while the jagged ridge of fir-forest fringes the ring with rough-tipped, thick, close shadow. Through the car window, the sight is picturesque. With my head sticking out, stealing glances at the high-off rooftop, night air rushing up my nostrils, the scene is intoxicating.

Urban life is handled and echoed and translated and constructed, middle-manned, criticked, reported upon--which is all very fascinating. But here, in uncultivated nooks, I hear rustles of the unmediated mystery of Life, and I slowly remember that we didn't make that. Nothing we engineer can replace that awful, unplumbable leap between unbeing and animation. The tiniest, raspiest cricket is beholden to none but his Maker for the throb of its blood through its vein and the shivering click of its legs.

Through my open window just now from out in the night I hear some horrible sound, I think the scratchy, pitchless screeching of a feral cat. I've seen one in the daylight looking, if storied, harmless enough, limping its mottled orange and brown way across the yard. At night, I would shudder to meet him.

But it's not merely some "virgin nature" that I'm talking about. Human life, too, partakes of this heady solidity, given and un-counterfeitable. The simple non-negotiables, needs and wants and natural habits, things desired not for their place in cultural habit but for their place in the felt needs of one's own life, emerge for me from the mist of an urban consciousness full to the brim where needs (and more) are abundantly met by someone else's contrivance even before they're felt as needs. I knew grocery stores before I knew hunger, sidewalks before the fear of being run over, water fountains before thirst, couches before weariness, companions before loneliness, entertainment before tedium, baths before smelliness, and Art Crawls before the need to learn to see my world. I was born into a world full of answers; questions came later.

The St. Cloud Art Crawl--that's what I came here to write about. There's a line from the beginning of James Agee's A Death in the Family that often runs through my head. He's talking about all that is familiar to him, and in particular his close family members: even they, he notes with a sort of resigned reproach, a despair pressing outward into daring, "will not ever tell me who I am." I've applied this predicate in my mind to many a subject, many an experience or book or influence. It may show me something, give me some window on the Real Thing, but in the end, it still hasn't turned to look me in the face and tell me what my place in it all is. But after the St. Cloud Art Crawl on Friday it struck me that while you may never be able to tell me who I am, perhaps if I listen to you telling me who you are, I'll be better able to fit myself in here beside you.

The St. Cloud Art Crawl was, as expected, a rather more sanguine creature than its angsty Twin Cities cousin--more of a "decoration crawl" that featured a lot of hang-in-your-living-room watercolor nature scenes in place of St. Paul's tornadoes-of-existential-blackness-and-naked-skeletons-on-canvas. But I found, wandering with my dad through the many gallery-ified salons (if you're looking for a new hairdresser, by all means, try St. Cloud; we have no idea how this city keeps six in business in the one-block downtown) looking at paintings, photography, quiltwork, and pottery, that when I emerged back out onto the street, something was different about my eyes. I was catching things in line and hue. The artists, I found, had lent me their tapestries. Their artistic choices and comprehensible simplifications of the real world were making my surroundings more intelligible to me. I drifted to sleep that night with more texture and thickness around me in my imagination of my world than I have felt anywhere since I last left home. I'm learning to see.

We heard no poetry, but I saw, through the glass, a man sitting in a space aptly named The Black Box, silent and Homer-like. The Bard?

"It reminds me of old New York City," said a guy walking past me.

The Brimming Quill's newest future physical location was duly discovered.

NOTICE

...which is to say that in the vicissitudes of the interweb, the polished post I thought I had published yesterday somehow reverted to an earlier version. A much different version. An unintelligible version.

Sigh...

a return, in two parts

In two parts and in two ways--to Minnesota and to the blog. First, I'll publish a now out-of-date draft I wrote a few days before leaving school last week. At some point with posts for this blog the options seem to be 1) edit, 2) publish, or 3) discard--all mutually exclusive--so I'm just picking option 2 here and washing my hands of the consequences.

Spontaneity cadenzas over the basso continuo of duty. I write a blog post when I should be swimming hard to save my floundering biology grade. I wander atop the Hill in the blustering wind under blue and clouded sky and surrounded by miraculous green when all that should matter is Ovid and Dante and everything I can prepare myself to say about them from memory. Where is the balance between these things? Where is life in the midst of it all?

I'm always trying to find it, Life. To sniff out where the storyline is leading me next.

A college year seems more momentous than any in high school. The end of the year means the scattering back to our many states this rare collection of far-flung folks, and the release into the wild of the ones with functional wings, return doubtful. We first-years will shortly find ourselves back in places still familiar, but grown strangely small. The place that reared us, we thought was the whole world. It seems smaller now. More world has grown up around it, next to it--in some places, over it. There's a whole list of things now that we know exist, that are not to be found in that world. All the things the people back home knew that people here didn't (why they call me Madskolnikov, that Minneapolis is on the Mississippi, that Sebastian Joe's is no ordinary ice cream shop and Magers & Quinn is where you get your books), that we had to teach each other, now stands by a list of things that people back there don't know (who Saga Steve is, that one must be careful never to immanetize the eschaton, that Targets and escalators and coffee shops in the plural are very special things). And we, lonely links between these worlds.

______________________

There was more, but I've lopped it short. That picture, by the way, is from a magical nook in the ever-surprising town of Hillsdale. If you don't know where it is, you should go look for it, because I'm not telling. It's a secret.

So, second, I'm back in Minnesota for the summer, tucked away in a quiet parcel of land on the Mississippi. I woke up my first morning (I sleep with my shade open) to this, mistily muffled by the glass of my window:

So this is how we do mornings up here. Well, then, little town on the River. I see you can hold your own and then some.

As to what this new era, Summer After Freshman Year, is looking like for me, I'll leave that for a post of its own.

Till then!

spyhouse and rational irrationality

(Whew. Time flies when you're not blogging.)
A day may come when Maddy J. will stop talking about the city. But it is not this day.
     Let this suffice: When I was in Minnesota for Thanksgiving, I caught a glowing glimpse of this coffee house, stuck up in the corner of a long, low, brick building on the northeastern edge of Minneapolis. I vowed I'd return.
     Christmas break came and I ventured to it. Once I found the conspiratorially subtle door--which was, indeed, stuck up in the corner of a long, low, brick building--the place did not disappoint my weeks of anticipation. It was just as a long, low-lit, brick coffee shop called Spyhouse ought to be.
     On my way to the conspiratorially subtle door--just as I stepped into the building, and before I wandered from floor to floor peeking over plywood barricades sheltering undeveloped industrial-building-bowels in my search for the Spyhouse--I beheld a wide open, concrete-floored, two-story atrium emblazoned (rarely is that word so aptly applied: the thing was blazing bright) with this glowing tribute to the human settlement I love most: CITY.

Alright, enough about that. (It's just, the last post was called la ville me manque, so it seemed only fair to mention that I'm back in civilization.)

     Not quite back in civilization, though. I reside in the House on the Edge of the Small Town on the Edge of the Small City (doesn't have the same ring as Little House in the Big Woods, but it is near a Plum Creek), when I'm not packing up to live as a vagabond in the cities for a day or two as I'm doing now (yay, camper-friendly coffee shops!). But I don't mind living up in the country, away from town and acquaintance. It's quiet up there. The world outside is alive: snow and moon and frozen river, bare-branched island, smooth white field, frozen dirt road out front, stars that pierce the eye with whiteness. I can write and re-cover books (my new favorite crafty pastime) and read in relative peace. I can slip out and disappear into snow-muffled quiet anytime I like. I'm going a little crazy spending so much time in my head but that's pretty much life as normal; wot, wot?

     I often find it necessary to take a rather more conversational tone when breaking back into the blog after long, inexplicable absences. (On second thought, I think end-of-first-college-semester suffices as an explanation for this particular absence.) Problem now being, of course, that I've just explained how my conversation skills have fallen into rusty disuse due to my seclusion in the Minnesota tundra. (Taking one's language cues solely from books [and those, of a widely varied style] isn't always advisable, as we all know.) So I'm finding it necessary, this time, to take on instead an all-around inarticulate and likely obnoxious tone and that's just how it's gonna be.

     About the "rational irrationality" bit in the title: it's a term I learned in my principles of microeconomics class this semester (one of many such concepts I to which I was introduced and that I have now enthusiastically incorporated into my working vocabulary, to the chagrin, I'm sure, of anyone who actually has a right to use such terms; apologies) and I'm co-opting it to tell you about something else: hope.
     There's a moment in a book which I shall not name for fear of spoiling the moment where some characters we like quite a lot are in a tight spot--the last and most intractable of a long series of tight spots, in fact. There's no way out of this one. There just really isn't. Everyone's dying or incapacitated or lost or intrinsically incapable of leadership, they've all already been unaccountably lucky (and yet mercilessly unlucky) to get to even this point, and the bad guys have really got this one.
     Then friends pop out of the woods behind, surround our suffering chums, and fight off the bad guys. Friends you had forgotten existed, or of whom you'd never consciously thought, but who had every right to be right where they were all along.
     The point is, for a disciple of Christ, this is always the case. Friends Unknown are always hiding in the inscrutable thicket of the dead-end. Things are always better than you could conceive them to be. The sack is always hiding one more leaf of lembas. You can't see it, but you must reckon on it. That's the crazy walk of faith. You see the gap in the rope bridge and you step anyway, because that's part of the job description.

Peace.

la ville me manque

Above, a few pictorial memorials of my sweet taste of City a few weeks ago (Ann Arbor). I'd been told, soon after my arrival in Hillsdale, that I'd like Ann Arbor: "Lots of hipsters." I'm delighted to report that I do, in fact, like Ann Arbor, though honestly all it takes these days is a few bright lights and person or two outside the Hillsdale demographic spectrum (which generally consists of rather conservative-looking youths or professorial older types) to get me pretty excited.

        What particularly caught my fancy in this city, (besides the fact that I was on an outing to a fancy French restaurant and a Parisian-themed show, generously subsidized by the French department, and was accompanied by amiable new Francophile acquaintances) was something you could call its "creative space".

         We had some time between dinner and the show at that point of evening where the shops lights have just started glowing but the sky hasn't faded yet. We walked past a large wedding taking place in a farmer's market parking lot and a loud, colorful festival of sorts, and turned down a quiet street. Under the branches of the boulevard trees, the city was quiet and close. Doors and windows to my left drew my attention, the lettering on their surfaces emerging slowly in the dusk. A light on, in the recesses of a place, back through another doorway, spilling toward us over dark chairs and papers, suggestively silent; the insignia-ed signs of the establishments swinging above us, only hinting at the nature of these diminutive universes with their worlds of shadow and light behind glass. Their precise definitions remain mysterious; I've noted a portion of East Ann Street for further exploration. They seemed to be mixtures of living and working space--project headquarters, places where young, creative things were being nurtured.

        This is a painting I saw at the Toledo Art Museum a week and a bit ago, entitled Architectural Fancy With a Concert Party.

        It's an "architectural fancy". These places were atmospheric fancies come to life. Activity and material, purpose and practice, branding and fact all warped and woofed. We inhabit our spaces with dreams, not just doings, and here were dreaming places.

          Perhaps someday the Keefer House cum Brimming Quill will dream in paint and mortar.

Z: a foray into Inferno

It's Thursday again, that day I often begin under false pretenses. I muscle my way out of bed to my 8 o'clock microeconomics lecture, soothed with promises that after the 75 minute class I can drag my feet back to bed. This promise often proves empty, but I keep falling for it.
          Today instead of paying back the sleep I robbed myself of last night, I went to the library. Economics class always gets me thinking, early as it is in the morning, and during a recent class period I was possessed of a sharp ambition of writing a book like the pivotal (at least in the course of my own life) Terence Conran on Design, but about the market economics that underpin the modern world. Driven by this vision, I looked up the Library of Congress Classification for economics (HB) and made my way down to Purgatorio* to find it. My ambition to read up on economics a bit before I start my book received a check in the form of the eight or so rows of HB-filled shelves. Sobered, I pulled a modest tome from this section and wandered toward a few of the other letters I'd scribbled down: HF (business), PR (wherever William Blake fits), and PN (where I found a book on theater design**). I spent a happy couple of hours at a table by a window with these books spread before me as in the days of my public-library-raiding youth, reading about the professional maid service industry and a summer camp for communications CEOs. As I neared the end of my camp-out, I looked through the list of titles I'd written down and realized I hadn't hunted up Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers: The Printer as Designer and Craftsman. Library of Congress Classification: Z246. I soon found that the shelves in Purgatorio stopped among the Ps. There was nothing for it. To the Inferno.
           I'd never been down the strikingly sterile stairwell with its white walls and bright lights before. I slipped through the metal gate at the top of them with a cool shiver of anticipation, the ringing of my sandals on the steps striking in the silence.
           Stepping carefully, I made my way past hunched and studious souls to the last shelf, noticing a vague increase in the aggression of the titles upon my attention (walking through the library shelves, as we all know, is a perilous business; many little fingers reaching out with faded spines and sticky words to trip one up on the way to studying in the back). It took me a moment to realize however, that the Zs are... books on books. For some reason this was quite the impressive revelation to me. Z. Meta-books. I plopped on the floor, leafing through pages covered in Latin script or early German type, books smattered with the innards of other books, until I'd selected the one I'd kidnap for today: The Elements of Typographic Style, which has a pretty cover and is full of pretty letters. (...I'm a definite cover-judger.)
           Emerging at last into the bright world above with my stack of books and feeling (as I always do) roughly as though I've just raided a dragon lair (but trying to keep it cool on the outside), I go to lunch and make plans for diving back into real school work. And today, for my spirits if not for my droopy eyeballs, lair-raiding beats a nap.

*The Hillsdale library has three levels, beginning from ground level and working downward. The intensity of studiosity and enforced silence increases as one descends, which lends itself to Dantean designations. (Heck, almost anything lends itself to Dantean designations.)
** NaNoWriMo 2013 spoiler alert: This book is expected to be a major influence of this year's novel.

Lessons from Hillsdale, No. 2

Hillsdale is a quiet campus. It's small. It's isolated. It's beautiful.

Today is a grey day; everything's quieter, muffled by the mists. On my walk back to the dorm after my only Thursday class (an 8 o'clock) to return to sleep, I paused in the Barber House garden, as I often do. It's a remarkably lovely place, set between the two freshman girls' dorms: a little stone cottage housing the office of the park ranger for the Arboretum, suitably surrounded by sublimely lovely gardens. I'd never ventured into this particular nook of it, but my heart leaped within me when I saw a stone bench and remembered the book of poems I'd stowed in my bag that morning, perhaps out of a sort of impulse to keep my econ textbook company. It was a Billy Collins kind of moment.

Billy Collins' poems are matter-of-fact and impressionistic. I hear them in a lethargic, vaguely self-deprecating voice, a melange of absent-minded self-consciousness, whimsy with a measured tread. They usually begin in a weather-discussing sort of tone, and more often than not you're about to flip to the next page when the quiet violence of the last words, sometimes caustic, sometimes sweet, makes your eyelids fly open and you pause, sucking in your breath and glancing around at

the small plants singing

with lifted faces            

***

The town of Hillsdale has more life in it than most of us were expecting. I've ventured in a few times now (it's not a long walk, through campus and past old houses with small, overgrown yards; across railroad tracks). One outing was to the Farmer's Market, a small affair but wholesome. The outing before that was a broader exploration. We started with lunch at the Sahara Deli on the edge of town.

Lo and behold, what we had been told by upperclassmen was true: within the unpretentious confines of the local Grab N Go is a world-class Mediterranean deli, owned by a Manhattan native named Mohammed Ali, selling shawarma wraps and feta by the pint. We picnicked next to the parking lot, in a field of course grass behind a red complex of buildings that looked like a cross between a farm and a rail station. The air was thick and warm, and our wraps were warm and spicy.

It was a strange meal, we all remarked. To me, it typified the difference between "metropolitan" and "urban". The place is unpolished, far from the high street, but it felt like home to me, full of the quirky, cobbled-together, real-life vivacity of life in the city.

We continued on into the historical center of town.

First, the bookstore Volume One, with its cat, its Buddhas, its plethora of books from the 1800s that wouldn't have lasted the night in a Minneapolis shop, and its time machine (1950s refrigerator?).

I took note of the FOR SALE OR LEASE sign in the window of the Keefer House, a broad-stepped old building with a hefty lantern hanging above a front door of glass and wood, wide windows and an entanglement of metal steps and railings running around and beneath it. This, I dream, is the first future home of The Brimming Quill Coffee House (and performance venue, bookstore, artist market, gallery, community center... the whole bit). It could be the culture hub this town is yearning for! It could be a place of education and beauty, good coffee and fresh air, connected to craftsmen and creators around the world, the first plant of what could become a wide-reaching Brimming Quill cooperative, with sister hubs around the country and the world...

Hillsdale is a quiet town. It's small. It's isolated.

It gives us room to breathe. To create the space. To find things and decide how to order them in our imaginations. The whole story isn't given; it doesn't course over me with the pungent force of the Mississippi River cities that I'm from, cities that are always singing, shouting out from many lungs their colors and their loves.

Here I listen to clock tower toll and stroke a lamb's ear leaf growing in the garden of the Barber House. And I wonder what it means.

It's beautiful.

this painting is a proposal

Last night as I lay on my bed, my extra-long college dorm twin-sized mattress, with its patterned Target furnishings, my head (despite the extra length) nearly snug against the honey-colored standard issue bed frame, I could see the stars. The hotel-room-like curtains over our generously sized and sparsely metal-framed windows hang out a little bit, and between the undulations of their nondescript, grey-brown folds one can catch a glimpse of the sky. (It comes in handy in the mornings, when the sole spot of sunlight in the room is on my closed eyelids. But even if untimely woken, I open my eyes to blue sky.)
       But tonight it was dark out there, and as I lay on my bed in quiet meditation before sleep, with my grey, metal, $8 Target lamp glowing gently beside my head, I idly noticed a very white speck directly above my eyes, roughly twelve gazillion miles away. After lying in stillness a few moments more, I flicked off the light. A few more specks leaped into view.* I was praying and pondering, laying the current matter of my life in the open air of God's truth and the light of his presence, a habit I've neglected of late (to the detriment of my sanity). As I lay there tangent to the curve of the earth for once, instead of my customary perpendicularity, things became clearer in my mind. The earth as a playing field beneath the heavens, beneath heavens that are far from void, heavens from whose depths come forth our light and even our salvation, from which we await the eschaton, an upward vista brushed with mists and distant lights, the earth quiet and lowdown and heaving in the night all around me. The ancients cared much more for the stars than we, I often think to myself when those lights catch my eyes. And I think they are right.
        I was thinking of friends in faraway places: those back home in Minnesota, my classmates scattered abroad at their colleges and universities and mission projects, those dear ones I met across the pond this summer in Kilkeel. It was less bewildering to think of them than it often is. Spatially, it just all made more sense. We're all of us beneath the heavens, just a ways to the left or right, in full sight of the stars and their Liege.
         And time, too. I've been thinking of memory a lot, realizing that I tend to horde memories in the back of my mind like roses in vases, brooding over them until their dying aromas turn sickly. We're stewards of memory, we time-marching creatures. I heard a professor describe it thus: "The human mind is a complex interplay of anticipation, experience, and memory." Our spirits are less bounded by time than our bodies. We aren't stuck in the present. But when weaving the connections between past, present, and future, we have a responsibility to structural integrity, to connect in ways consistent with the true nature of things.
          The memory of the painting above drifted into my star-gazing mind. This painting is a proposal. I propose we meet once a year every year until one of us can't or won't. I grabbed a pen from beside my bed and scrawled "BLOG / proposition" in the dark on my wrist, to remind me to write this post. When I'd seen the painting at the Walker, it had struck me enough for me to take a picture of it, but just with its novelty. I couldn't see where it was contributing to the story I've been constructing my whole life to tell myself about reality. But on this night of peeping behind the curtain upwards, in the place in my mind beneath conscious thought where poetry lives, the painting snapped into place intuitively. It is people and times and places brought together. The painting is telling a story about living with and apart from people, the way in which our threads diverge and converge, the fact that memory and place live in the sacred space between us and aren't solely in our heads. That it's possible to go away and come back and be okay. You'll still be you and I'll still be me. That even though you can't step in the same river twice, there's still a thing called a river and there's still a you to do the stepping.**
          I got a letter this week. (From Karli :) ). And I wrote her one back. We're weaving from farther apart now, but we're still tossing threads back and forth, and it never was my tapestry to begin with. I guess that's what I'm realizing. The not-now and the not-here are out of my view, but the weaver's still weaving and nothing is lost.

*As an aside, ponder with me something I have often thought of when outside on a sunny day when a delicate green leaf casts shade over my eyes. This sunlight, this rolling golden force, has traversed the heavens at literally the speed of light for several minutes from a source a fraction of whose total power has been sustaining the growth of every green thing on our planet for millennia. The beam of light shoots out, zipping past Mercury and Venus, dodging satellites and asteroids and cyber junk, penetrates the atmosphere of the planet, zooms toward my face--and is deflected by a leaf. I don't know what that says about this cosmos of ours, but this and the fact that my piddling little lamp can douse the power of a star with its faint glow by virtue of its proximity to my eyes, I find intriguing and mildly outrageous.
**...to take a leaf from my philosophy class's book. I'm making a concession to Heraclitus but stopping short of Cratylus.

Postscript: I'm stilling mulling over the dead-rose memories metaphor. I can't figure out how to let go without forgetting. How do you throw out the dead roses without losing them forever?

Perhaps a compost pile...

Lessons From Hillsdale, No. 1

Thomas Merton, in his book No Man is an Island: "When we do not desire the things of this world for their own sake, we become able to see them as they are. We see at once their goodness and their purpose, and we become able to appreciate them as we never have before."

This place is no New York City. But why should it be?

I've been reminded here already to seek the Good, the True, the Beautiful--not the popular, not the trendy, not the aimless preference of a wandering mind.

Well, the day has come and I'm here now, in this little town surrounded by flatlands and far from my coffee shops and the bright lights, far from the one-glance judgments of the big city and the people who dress and act with those judgments in mind, far from my accustomed frameworks of cool, and I'm on the hunt for substance. For the Real.

keeping house

One more full day to add to the handful I've spent in this new house before we pack up and drive east. To recap (I've been getting a bit motion sick myself) we left Our House in the city in May. I stayed on in Minneapolis in the household so colorfully and delightfully narrated here. (I miss it already.) Then I went to Northern Ireland, and that little nook in Europe became my home for two weeks. Then we went on a family trip across the country. And then we came--home, I guess. This house up here in the country--it is starting to feel like home. Which alarms me. Because I'm not keeping this house for long. Because I'm going to college. Because I grew up or something.

         Tonight I stood down by the river (our house is on the Mississippi) for a while, slipped out of the house after dark, clutching a dark green sweater from Northern Ireland. The lights of the house glowed warm behind me, and the strange, thin light of the moon fell cold all over me and the dark trees and grass. The night out here is dark, even on a moonlit night. Darker than the city. (Oh, those urban evenings, standing out on the back deck hiding from the blade of the neighbors' floodlight, stars peeping through faintly and the world breathing soft and close and warm in the sighs of passing cars and chirps of bugs and the crackle of a radio.) Out here my naked feet fear snakes and worms; I go back in for shoes. My heart beating a little harder than it ought to be (where do wild turkeys sleep?), I make my way under the trees and down the ivied path to The Front Stoop (the metal steps that lead down to the water). The steps used to be half submerged, but as the summer's worn on, the rivers slunk down to expose a stepped bank of sand and stones and, to the particular delight of my little sisters, clay.
           There I stood, city kid feeling small out here in the wide world. The moon is brilliantly shiny but its light is threadbare. On the smooth but always southward slipping water the moon's image is softly crumbled. The stars are faint in the mists and the nearness of the moon's light, but they are high, high above me: faraway nobles of the night, and I am quieted. In front of me the Island (the Isle of the Goose King, we call it, the little girls and I; on which I set foot for the first time earlier today, after braving with friends the exposed riverbed, a million small stones all coated papery white with sun-crusted river scum) coos with the life of the night, crickets and unnamed hums.
            And there, far down to my right, a bridge roars and fills the world with its roaring. I can just see it down there in the midst of all this bluish velvet night, a line smeared with many little worlds of moving light, cones white and sparks red like fire. The freeway groans with the weight of its speed, the smallness of those worlds of light.

            And I talked with God.

            And then as I bent to draw my hand one more time through that magic moon-touched water, I heard a splash and spooked. I saw a long legged silhouette leap across water. I saw a little, bumpy, rivery lump sitting on a rock. But I didn't see it for long, because I was running toward those metal steps (on which I slammed a shin) with adrenalin in my steps. Back inside, where stars are not, nor frogs.

a far country (part 3)

read parts one and two

Of course there's much to say, of grace and destiny and a heart full of love slipping out a bit through tired eyes in tiny happy tears as we drove from the Dublin airport up into Kilkeel, and the hills around me were embracing me like their long-lost own...
...and much also not to say but to let rest, about jet-lag, trying to sleep on planes, and subsequent florid prose spilling out on the internet. Suffice it to say, there's a lot that suffering teaches about God, and there is also a lot that sublime delight teaches about God. For now, it's been his will to put me through the latter.

the art of peace

Embarkation

This morning I woke up for the fourth time, late, in a sweat. I'd gotten to bed after two o'clock in the flash-flooding morning and was planning to sleep in late, which in my house of many occupants means sleeping through several earlier awakenings. It was around eleven, and amidst the pile of matters that rushed to my head as soon as I was relatively conscious, the stack of letters I had to sort through and mail as soon as possible was foremost. I felt sick. I'd fallen asleep in a state of soul similar to the thundery, lightning-flicked weather: whirling, wet, full. My graduation party yesterday ended in an exciting flurry of extreme weather, and once I wound my contented and reflective way home in the middle of the night, my mind and heart were as full and heavy as the clouds. This was the Last Big Thing connected with the end of the school year that I'd needed to get through, and it was gotten through. Here I was, quasi-grown-up and more independent than perhaps I should be at this stage, feeling ready to take on the world on my own but not sure if I should.

       But I'd fallen asleep to the sounds and words of Josh Garrels' "The Resistance".

How do good men become a part of the regime?

They don't believe in Resistance.

Hold fast

like an anchor in the storm.

We will not be moved.

       I have to have periodical reminders that just because I feel some way, I don't have to believe that way; that just because I want something doesn't mean it's a good thing. Resistance. Resistance to lies, laziness, and despair logic.

       These song lyrics that had lulled me to sleep got me out of bed when the mortifying weight of late Thank-You notes and a messy room were chaining me to the mattress. Resistance.

       I read my Bible a bit, pumped the Josh Garrels album through my headphones, and set in on the stack. I walked the bundle of mail to a nearby postal drop box and returned an empty milk bottle to the co-op.* My messenger bag and my heart were both a good bit lighter on the return journey, with tasks squarely faced and accomplished.

       I am now lying on my red-quilted bed, listening to more Josh Garrels and typing. Peace is washing over me.

      To get through life in a way that doesn't lie about who God is, I need to be intentional about keeping myself in the right frame of mind. Lacking the rigid structure of a full-time job or studentship and possessing a large degree of independence, responsible, independently motivated time management is crucial to not wasting my life. But what is just as a crucial is heart-management.

My rest is a weapon against the oppression

of man's obsession to control things

 Is my heart as happy in Jesus as it should be? Are things getting buried that ought to be more fully experienced, or expurgated? Are the different fumes of spiritual and emotional states and experiences percolating in my soul combining into deadly toxins or life-giving elixirs? Am I remembering that

the Liberation will not be televised

when it breaks like lightning across the skies?

       I feel like a little boat on turbulent seas. Watching the winds, positioning the sail to catch the air right. Watching the birds that wheel overhead and drinking in the different flavors of salt air that come with my current surroundings. Bending down to look at the blues and purples and glowing greens and bright reds and yellows of the shallows. Listening to the silence, singing to myself. Peace takes work.

       But it can work. Hope on, little boat.

*Though I wish I could say this very hipsterish action is a part of my weekly regime, the Organic Milk in the Glass Bottle was a special occasion event.

The End, or The Beginning, or The In-Between

It's been a while. Much has happened since Easter, the occasion of my last post. In the space of three weeks, (1) I moved out of the parental home [see photo of my old room above, titled I Grieve the Fading Memory], because (2) my parental home was moving out of my hometown, before (3) I was done with high school. I graduate this Saturday. And then I run off to run at the state track meet.

To help me ease back into the blog after a hiatus of—ahem—two months, here are some lists:

The Books That Came With Me When I Grabbed Some Stuff and Moved Out of My House in the Middle of the Last Week of High School

1. Bible
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios
4. Terence Conran on Design
5. the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
6. U2 by U2
7. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Damion Searls.
   
   

The Songs That Have Soundtracked All of This (all this youth and change)
* the links are to legit [i.e. artist-published] videos

1. "Sometimes I Get a Good Feeling" by Avicii (Yep.)
2. Andrew Peterson's album Light for the Lost Boy, especially “You'll Find Your Way” and “Day by Day”
3. “Movement and Location” and “Soon or Never” by Punch Brothers 
   (You should really go buy "Soon or Never" and listen to it right now.)
4. “Talk” by Coldplay
5. “White as Snow” and "Cedars of Lebanon" by U2 
   (The latter contains one brief expletive.)
6. “Next to Me” by Civil Twilight
7. “Leaving So Soon” by Keane

I have a moment to breathe, and what air! What early summer air, robust but not overbearing, all shot through with sunlight and still cool and clear as fresh water. The summer stretches before me, and in the midst of missing my home, my school, and life as it was for quite a bit, summery exuberance is catching up with me again.

new leaves at new house.

the most beautiful butchering

If I'm honest, I've always liked Christmas better than Easter. Christmas made me feel good. Easter made me feel bad. Because before Easter always had to come Good Friday, when my family would watch the Jesus movie. For all its happy happy beginnings, the story comes to such a horrible climax as they beat, mock, and kill the Christ. What made it all the worse was that I knew he was enduring all this because of the bad things I had done. I couldn't blithely detach myself from the horrors of the crucifixion, because I knew it should have been me up there. It was suffering that directly involved me. I was filled, perplexingly, with both indignation and guilt, revulsion and pity. The unpleasantness of this solemn day never really lost its bitter taste, even on the flower-and-candy-filled Sunday.

This Good Friday, the Lord brought Friday's pain and Sunday's joy together for me, as they centered in himself. I was reading Psalm 18, which like many Old Testament passages seemed to come in some mysterious way from the mouth of the Christ. I came to this:

"The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness;

according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.

For I have kept the ways of the Lord,

and have not wickedly departed from my God.

For all his rules were before me,

and his statutes I did not put away from me.

I was blameless before him,

and I kept myself from my guilt.

So the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,

according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight." Psalm 18:20-24 ESV

This is what the righteous Galilean had more right than David to say. And yet by the will of God it was turned into solemn irony: the Lord dealt with me according to his righteousness. And according to the dirtiness of my hands He rewarded him. Contemplating the cross, that horrid spectacle, that pinnacle of all that is unjust, gruesome, and ugly, I began to see no sulking victim of my sin, but an Agent--not just wounds, but power. The dying Lamb was not looking out on those for whom he died and saying, "Look what I've had to go through for you. You'd better feel bad," which, I guess, is sort of what I've usually felt on Good Friday. He was looking to his Father and pleading for our redemption. His sacrifice was no pity play. He didn't do it to impress us. We could never be impressed enough to make it worth it. He did it to save us.

This event that really ought to have compounded our guilt--our sin killed God in the flesh--is precisely what absolved it. Someone who could accomplish that, who could turn things so on their head, whose joy could not be quenched by death, whose love triumphed--this was someone glorious. Instead of fear, shame, and guilt at the embarrassing spectacle of Calvary, I knew the love of Jesus for me, in all its bloody tragedy. A love outside of myself, the love of someone real. The strongest, most humbling and terrifying love, sweeping me out of my self-centeredness and up into new life beyond guilt.

At the cross we do see ourselves, how bad our sin is. Let us contemplate the wickedness of sin, that it prompts such fearsome fury from our holy God. But let us remember that the point of Good Friday, even in its convicting capacity, is not to turn our eyes upon ourselves, but toward that just and holy God whose wrath is so terrible. I was prepared, uneasily, for my familiar narcissistic guilt this Good Friday--feeling bad to have imposed on Christ with the inconvenience of my mistakes. But now, as I saw Jesus in Scripture, I was tasting real, heart-broken, adoring grief. Because the point isn't us; it's God. It was his love and his holiness, not my guilt, that ultimately drove him to this extremity. He could have punished us, and we would have known how bad our sin was. But instead, in one terrible moment, he showed us both our badness and his greatness. In doing so he did not downplay the horribleness of my sin; he engulfed it in his majesty.


That the violent death of the Founder is at the center of our faith has sometimes unnerved me. Nothing can be carefree in a religion like this. All our joy is built on pain.

I guess, yesterday I saw that even deeper into the mystery of things than the pain is love--Love Himself. I had not realized that this is what love looked like. That it was quite this potent.

What a beautiful, beautiful Savior. Strong in his meekness. Unfathomable in his glories and sufferings--oh, the mystery of the Cross! Blessed, wounded head. How deep and heart-breaking his sorrows! How deep and heart-remaking his love! I shut my mouth. I contemplate my unworthiness, and then I forget myself to marvel--as we will marvel forever--at Him: he in whom love and pain are so mingled.